Book Promo
If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH
FROM LILANIA BEGLEY: Star Bright : A Sweet Western Romance
Snow is sweeping across the plains, and Cande finds herself caught in its path. She needs shelter, first of all. Secondly, she needs the sky to clear if she’s going to have a once-in-a-lifetime chance at the comet she is tracking. What she finds in the midst of the storm is something she couldn’t have anticipated in the form of a man who shares her snowbound cabin.
FROM HENRY VOGEL: The Princess Scout
Separated from their classmates during a drill, Scout Cadets Anne Villas and Christine Montide find themselves stranded on a previously uncharted world. By pure chance they’ve discovered a lost human colony that wants to stay lost, and the rulers of this planet will use all the power they have to keep it a secret.
Anne is not just any cadet, though. She’s “The Princess Scout” — the daughter of David Rice, the Scout Corps’ legendary hero, and Callan, indomitable heir to the throne of Mordan. With the might of a whole planet against them, can Anne and Chris find a way to not merely survive, but win?
The Princess Scout mashes up space opera excitement with the dangerous atmosphere of a Cold War thriller, resulting in the latest standalone hit novel in Henry Vogel’s best-selling Scout series. Read it today!
FROM JAMES TOTTEN: Retaliation: Breaching Ain’t Easy.
Unmanned Combat Drones, Russian enforcement battalion tactical groups, and Artificial Intelligence compete on the modern battlefield. What happens when the drone drivers are cut off? How can you hide over 200 new T95s from spy satellites? The 49th Armored Division meets the 4th Guards Tank Division on the steppes of Russia near Kursk. Russia launches nukes again. Will the new Johnny Five save the day? Need someone to say, Let’s Get Ready to Rumble.
FROM MEL DUNAY: Shadow Captain (Star Master Book 1)
His one chance to escape slavery could trap his brother in a terrible fate! Jetay has been on the run with his brother for a long time, hiding his psychic powers from the evil Red Knights. Living as a slave on a star freighter, Jetay dreams of freeing himself and his brother, and of wielding his powers openly. On a frontier planet, Lady Lanati of the Partisan Alliance seeks his help for a secret mission. It will take him across the stars to the edge of a black hole, with a Red Knight chasing him every step of the way. He might finally get a chance to use his powers for good. But the price of that chance may be too high, putting his brother in grave danger. Can Jetay save himself and his brother without sacrificing Lanati and her friends? If he can’t find a way to save them all, the battle against evil may be over before it begins….
BY ARTHUR O. FRIEL, REVIVED BY D. JASON FLEMING: The Explorer (Annotated): The classic pulp adventure
To ride the white rapids, to plunge into the throbbing depths of the Orinoco jungle into the forbidden land of the poisoned arrow Indians — all this Hammond would dare, in the full confidence of youth. Experience he had absolutely none.
Of course, there was his new companion Thomas, but then, he was only a trader.
- This iktaPOP Media edition includes a new introduction giving historical and genre context.
FROM J. L. CURTIS: The Short Stories: Volume 1
These stories were written for various anthologies I’ve appeared in, so there is a large variance in the tone and type of stories. I hope you enjoy this collection, and thank you for spending your hard earned dollars on it! There will be links at the end of the book for each anthology. You might want to check them out, as there are some great writers in them!
FROM LORI JANESKI: Raven (The Carter Files Book 2)
Revenge is a dish best served in space.
Dozens of children across the Interplanetary Commonwealth have disappeared from their homes. There are no motives, no ransom demands, no bodies, and nothing to connect the victims to each other – except the kidnapper’s signature, a single raven feather left at each scene.
With no progress on the case, it has been reassigned to Special Agent David Carter and his new team of Division 7 agents. Together with his wife, retired agent and profiler Veronique Carter, they must race against the clock–and obstacles within their own agency–to find the missing children before it’s too late.
But the closer they get to the culprit, the more it appears his real target might be them.
FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Technoserf
The Madrian Empire rules worlds as numerous as the grains of sand on a beach. When the Madrians conquered Roby’s homeworld, they brought him to this godforsaken lump of a world, to toil at their will.
Now the Gate has failed, leaving them without communications or transport to the rest of the Empire. When Roby identifies the problem, he’s offered a chance to fix it.
Roby now faces a quandry. Even if he can repair the damage, should he? Will he be better off reunited with the masters’ metropole? Or will he only complicate a difficult life?
FROM SPENCER E. HART: Fire in the Andes
Pulp-Noir meets Sci-Fi. A short adventure. The Year is 1949, in a timeline not quite our own.
A missing atomic engineer. A lovely but sad senorita. And another assignment for Bert Henderson, this time to the mountains of Argentina.Did the engineer defect to the other side? And what’s with all these Germans?
Will Bert survive long enough to uncover the mystery? Or will he succumb to the Fire in the Andes?
FROM ILENE KAYE: It Had To Be Yuu
Only Yuu could manage to get himself kidnapped—on a planet in the middle of a blizzard, no less—and not even know it. It’s up to space survey pilot Audra Marin to fly to the rescue, but when she gets her childhood playmate home alive, she’ll make him pay.
Only Audra could stumble into a fraud investigation and mistake it for a kidnapping. Trading company heir Yuu Ra-Dezan has to find a way to keep Audra from complicating his efforts to find an embezzler. “She’s my fiancée” seems like the best cover story—but when did his childhood nemesis turn into the hottest woman in the galaxy?
When his host’s robots try to hold them at blaster-point, Yuu and Audra trip over each other to foil a plot to steal the fastest ship in the galaxy. The only piracy these two will accept is stealing each others’ hearts.
FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Schrödinger Paradox: Entanglement
In the face of extinction, you do what you must, regardless of who stands in the way.
Tom Beadle only volunteered for NASA’s neighborhood watch program when his department said it would maybe help him get tenure.None of them counted on the Neighborhood Watch becoming a mortifying political liability when a malfunctioning probe accidently reveals an asteroid hiding behind the larger outer planets, setting off impact alarms– and politicians looking for blame. When their answer is to defund the Watch program and fire all involved, Tom’s only chance to save the earth is to lie through his teeth and try to deflect the asteroid under cover of harvesting rare not-of-this-earth elements. And even that may not work.
Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.
We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.
If you have questions, feel free to ask.
Your writing prompt this week is: TRAIL
According To Hoyt 
“You’re an Ultra Tracker. Does that you mean that you can follow a trail anywhere on Earth?”
“In theory but it’s hard for me to follow a trail over an ocean since I can’t fly.”
Thanks for boosting the signal on my Short Stories!
Speaking of which, my first book was titled Vignettes, since it was a series of short stories in the Grey Man world. I got a one star review, complaining that it was nothing by a bunch of short stories… sigh…
Stick to the trail, Autumn told herself. All the more in that you have to abandon the horses, the cart, and your companions to leave it. She tried not to move her head, even when whiteness danced in the gloom. She wondered if ghosts were white to catch the gaze.
Hi-
I’m trying to remember a children’s book that I think I recall being one Sunday book promos (and probably by one Mad Genius Club authors) that was something about werewolves and other rhymes. I thought it was by Ceder Sanderson and came out just after her Cute Moose book, but I couldn’t find it last night on Amazon. Does anyone else remember it?
Thanks and apologies for the thread hijacking
that would be One Hungry Werewolf and other Rhymes. It was written by Jimmie Bise and illustrated by myself. It should be available on Amazon still!
Thanks! I don’t know why I missed it on your Amazon author page.
”Firebird, Cheesecake, bandits, bullseye 350 mark 245, 250k, buster,” came the call from the SWACS controller. I had thought “Cheesecake” was a goofy name for the SWACS bird out at the far surveillance point from the carrier when they gave out tactical callsigns at the brief, but now I was happy it didn’t sound like anything else over the digitally noisy secure comms link today.
”Firebird flight go trail,” came the call from my flight lead, call sign Crunchy. I was firebird three this hop, so that meant she wanted me to play follow the leader. I shifted over to my left and dropped into the trail position on the first two ships, keeping my ten thousand km interval while accelerating to max combat thrust per the “buster” call.
”Firebird, target maneuvering, go left 5 in-plane, target count ten-plus,” called the SWACS controller, his voice as calm as if he were asking for apple pie back in the ships mess. “Weapons free.”
”Firebird weapons free,” acknowledged my flight lead, her voice tightening up just a notch. She followed up with “Firebird go Stinger”, pulling the number two ship up abeam of her ship and leaving me to the rear in the center. I adjusted as Fergy, the number two, shifted his position, as I switched my master arm to ON. Various beeps and imagery in my helmet display told me my weapons were now armed.
Suddenly my radar warning receiver display on the virtual panel projected into my helmet lit up. “SPIKE! Firebird has Spike on the nose,” called Crunchy, as the bandits lit up their search radars and lidars, looking for us.
At least it wasn’t going to be a boring hop.
“Wait. What do you mean that all the members of the jury get to follow me around for the next week? Why?”
“It helps them get to know you and get a feel for your character, which will help them determine whether you’re guilty or not.”
“Umm.. “
“Besides, you’re the one who requested it. What did you think a ‘trail by jury’ involved?”
“Trail by jury?!!! I thought that was a typo!”
Snicker.
Actually, if you go back 200 years or so, juries were selected based on how well they knew you. Their job was to determine the liklihood of your doing the thing, as well as the evidence tying you to the thing. (“No, Padre wouldn’t do something like that, and he was preaching in the next county west that morning,” vs, “Oh, yeah, he’s been threatening that guy for at least a year, and we all know what he did to Bob back when we were all working in Charlotte.”)
Or George likely did that to Fred, but there were very good reason for George (or anybody else) to do that to Fred. :twisted:
“Fred needed killin’.”
“It’s a beautiful trail,” Izumi sighed. “It’s also false as hell.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, looking over her shoulder.
“Okay, the numbers are all rounded off, which would be an indication of fraud, but there’s no mistakes. None. Humans would make mistakes, and a software package would be precise, but this is methodically precise,” she tapped a row of expenses on her screen. “There’s a beautiful Benford Numbers arc that is perfectly designed to suggest who’s responsible, yet it’s too good. It’s an evidence orgy.”
“And how many orgies of evidence have you been to?” I chuckled, remembering the old movie.
“None,” Izumi replied, snapping her chewing gum.
I can honestly say “orgies of evidence” is a phrase I’ve never, ever heard before!
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OrgyOfEvidence
LOL
I did a search on “Orgy Of Evidence” and found that. 😊
You have died of dysentery.
Excellent. I once saw a “Jurassic trail” T-shirt which read “you have died of pterodactyls and dysentery.”
Lurie held up a hand and turned to her friend. “This doesn’t look good,“ she whispered. She and June followed the trail of evidence, walking quietly, into the family room where their suspects whirled with guilty looks on their faces.
Her sons’ and June’s daughter’s faces were smeared with chocolate and shreds of foil and plastic grass littered the rug.
“What did I tell you? I said to leave the Easter candy alone!” Lurie shouted. “I hope you don’t expect me to go out and get more candy, because it isn’t going to happen.”
June folded her arms and glared.
You nailed it again, Alice. I could see myself right in that picture: Ohio, 1969, and a very naughty little boy with chocolate frosting on his face (me)!
With trees all around and no paths to be seen, young Nigel was near panic. “I’m a right berk,” he said. “I’ve gotten us lost.”
“Oh, don’t worry, Nigel,” said Lily brightly, “I’ve found a trail. Follow me.”
I might have known, thought Nigel as he took Lily’s outstretched hand.
“Of course Lily had the GPS and geomapping modules. She could have walked us out of New Guinea if necessary!” Nigel Slim-Howland laughed at the recollection.
Agnes was away at school when that happened. Testing Lily had been tough on her brother. She would have stopped it if she’d known.
Dawn or dusk was the best time to hike Epsilon’s surface, as it was neither too hot nor too cold. There was no trail; the North Gate was visible for miles in any direction. Dr. David Cambridge pulled on his jacket and set out for a brief interval of peace.
Doctor Cambridge heard a voice calling him in the gathering darkness. Turning, he saw her. “Cherry!” he said. “I didn’t see you coming out.”
“I trailed behind you,” she admitted as she caught up with him. “But I just wanted to…I mean…” Tentatively, she laid her head on his shoulder.
The door marked DISTRICT ATTORNEY swung open and a striking purple-haired woman strode into the outer office, trailed by a man you barely noticed in her presence. She planted herself in front of the reception desk and announced in a commanding voice, “I am here to post bond for President Trump’s legal appeal. Though the reason he should have to pay the government to receive his Constitutional rights escapes me.”
The man took his place beside her before the receptionist recovered from her shock, enough to stammer out a couple of rote phrases, anyway. “Do you have an appointment? Who are you?”
She received a deadly little smile in return. “I did try, but appointments related to this case are oddly difficult to obtain, and none seem to be available before the deadline. As for my identity, I believe you already know. I’ve been on the news often enough. But, just in case you’ve never seen me on TV, or YouTube, or your memory is defective, my name is Tovala Evans. My husband and I are providing this bond as a personal loan to President Trump.”
Sturdy wooden crates about two by two by two feet in size began appearing out of thin air; on the reception desk, on the tables, and on the floor when there was no space left on the furniture. Each one was stenciled INDUSTRIAL DIAMONDS GRADE 1A 0.6 MM 400 KG NET. She fixed the receptionist with a steely gaze after the final one. “There you go. Ten metric tons of top-quality industrial diamonds, value in excess of five hundred million dollars. They are now physically and legally in the custody of your office. We require a receipt.”
There wasn’t a rote response for this situation. “You— you can’t pay a bond with those!”
Her next smile even more deadly, and menacing. “Your bosses are preparing to seize President Trump’s property to pay it. Since real estate will serve the purpose, so will these. Diamonds are a much more convenient and fungible commodity than buildings. I’m sure your office will take care to see that none of them turn up missing. The consequences would be most…unfortunate.”
He could not track a trail, he had to hope they would keep to the path, but they had not reason to leave, but then, they had had no reason to just leave and give him no word of what they were doing.
“So anxious you are,” murmured a woman.
Rocks littered the side of the trail. And sometime cliffs towered above them, or worse, dropped off below. The worst was when the trail itself passed on the only level part of the slope. Trees growing on the rock were twisted with the effort of growing there. Sylvie stared ahead.
The young(-ish) man strode along the mountain High Trail, a smile on his face and a spring in his step. Beneath that quiet surface, though, Angus Claybourne had a lot on his mind.
Like a theory, or parametrized gaggle of them, that was like to turn out to be the long-sought Unified Field Theory, or as good as one. With a few tantalizing “phenomenological” hints of applications, which did things like directed gravity and antigravity; or annihilation of ordinary matter to energy; or like “stacking” electrons to make doubled weight and charge cousins that in turn made atoms four times smaller, which made ‘collapsed’ matter sixty-four times denser… or even more so, for more than twice.
In theory, in approximate maybe-true calculations. While other equally not so rigorous calculations said it was (sometimes) inconsistent with itself.
A.k.a, shiny nonsense.
When you get stuck, go for a walk said the age-old advice. Well, it was hard to do better at that than the High Trail… right around the edge of the high caldera of the tallest mountain on the planet. Yes, it was a ten-foot trail paved in cast basalt and roofed with polycarbonate an inch thick; but, hey, you could walk here without a suit, or at least only an emergency sweat-porous skinsuit.
The ‘air’ on the other side of the reinforced plastic was far thinner than even the hundredth-of-Earth of Martian air at ‘sea level’ — more a notion of an atmosphere, or a ghost of one, up here round the summit of Olympus.
But the artificial ‘breeze’ inside was cool and fresh; and the view was… well, unique caught nearly all of it. As it did your breath.
There was an idea, a human lifetime old by now in the last decades of the 21st century, called the “swampland conjectures” — that said, at least in the context of the string theories, what you should expect of a unified field theory… what was in it, or more important, what was not. And there was a lot less in that, than the theory Angus had been working on, or been haunted by, these last few years.
The underlying idea being, out of all that wide ‘landscape’ of possible (string) theories, that hardly any of it (them) was dry ground that would give you sensible actual physics, once you extracted the results from the dry abstractions of ultra-deep math that defined a theory. You’d get at least a decent result, though, if you dodged all the boggy spots and kept strictly to the dry land.
But still there was that… other. The amazing, 1930s-style super-science stuff. Not pulp fiction; maybe-usable pulp technology. If and only if (as mathgeeks loved to say) his theory both made sense, and was right.
He still couldn’t get past the first point. Even far enough to define any good do-able experiments to cut straight to the second.
The different views on his own theory said it was different things; like that old story of the blind wise men and the elephant, it was much like a tree, much like a snake, much like a wall… Drat and blast!
And so much of it looked to be right at the border of the swampland, all on dry land, yes, but so much of it just barely; all over the place, too.
And the fields, the strange ones that did the amazing things, all fell off sharply with distance; exponentially, or worse, like a “Gaussian” normal curve, dwindling fast to nearly nothing, which was strange indeed. At the level of the few ‘this is what engineering looks like’ glimpses of it he and Colette together had ever managed.
Almost as if they were uninvited guests, those fields, rude party-crashers at the naming-day party of sane, normal spacetime…
Once again, that shiver crawled up his back. The one that told him he was so close to something big — if only he could close the gap and close the deal.
He wanted to swear out loud; instead he actually smiled and waved, at the young Asian-looking person coming into view around the next bend in the trail. (The old Polish saying “only fools and Americans smile at total strangers” cut no ice here; a frontier culture prizes mutual aid, and as Heinlein once said, an armed society is a polite society.)
“Amazing, isn’t it?” — then after that tiny conventional pause — “I’m Airmed Arakawa.”
“Yes. — Angus Clayborne. — No matter how many times you see it…”
“My parents first brought me here at six greenyears, just off the liner from Yokohama. I don’t think it’ll get old when I’m eighty, I mean forty redyears.”
“Can you believe everything you see out there is actually part of Olympus Mons, Nix Olympica as they called it in the old telescope-seeing days? Martian lava is so fluid this old volcano is bigger than you can see from its own summit.”
And she smiled. “I still can’t believe I’m really here, some days. Living on another world, after all the dreams, all the disappointments, all the idiots saying we shouldn’t ever bother. Sorry, I’m very opinionated and wouldn’t’ve fit in too well if we’d stayed home in Japan. Of course, my parents did name me after an Irish goddess, of all people…”
And he found himself grinning. “Look up Aengus mac Og, then, you’ll find a certain similarity. Pleased to meet you, Airmed Miss Arakawa.”
She bowed, really-truly did. “An honor, Doctor Professor Claybourne.” And turned and walked sprightly on.
Busted, some part of his mind chided/complained. But beneath that, he was already back at work. Mumbling, as he only rarely did, to himself, for himself alone.
“Everything you can see is volcano, not typical of the rest of Mars. Like that stranger at the party, like the uninvited fairy at the christening”
And he stopped, dead still, not walking not talking barely breathing, but thinking almost FTL.
Here the landscape looks different, because the whole landscape is not typical, but a special case… Oh My Dear Lord, what if the landscape of different theories is also the landscape of spacetime?
What if the content of the theory, the “laws of physics” as we’d say in our old-fashioned way, varies across space and time? In a relativity of physics, itself…
So that you need a meta-field theory to describe how those foreign guest fields, themselves, sneak into the background theory of all the rest?
And Angus Claybourne smiled a slow, contented smile. Not the cocky sort of at least a few of his colleagues, but as slow and warm as a peat fire.
Because now it all fell into place. Because now it all had a place to go.
Yes, those guest fields couldn’t be the background or default state of the whole cosmos; they were inconsistent, they didn’t fit, and doubtless the ‘meta-physics’ that described their presence in spacetime would rule that out. But still, they could exist, did exist, could be realized… over a ‘small’ stretch of space and time.
That could be microseconds, or millennia; could be angstroms, or millions of miles. Over which you could, working with meta-physics, change the content of ‘physical law’ — for it, too, was only another kind of field now, a field made out of field theory, itself.
If you can dream it, you can do it. You need “only” make, or wheedle, the underlying meta-physics to share your dream. If you may, if you might…
He took out his dataphone, dialled a number. It connected to the local grid in the trail-tunnel, bypassing the netsats; called across the wide full-public zeronet, dove down a gateway to a one-net, went deeper…
“Hello, Angus. I’m busy at one of my paintings for about the next” skip to machinevoice “33 minutes” skipback to Colette’s recorded words “but you can reach me on priority of course. May your walk be fruitful.” Still with the same hint of Marseille in her excellent English as ever.
“Hello, Colette. The Scottish Navigator has sighted the New World, or I’m a monkey’s uncle. See you personwise soon, blessedest.”
“I know Plum Blossom War is a classic, but I simply can’t suspend my disbelief every time I see those four habitable moons presenting different faces to their primary at different times. It’s the same problem I had when I took an elective on science fiction as an undergrad and one of the books was Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Dispossessed. It wasn’t the economic issues that killed it for me like my friend who was a business major, who wrote her essay on why the lack of a market to determine relative value of goods led to the mass deaths during the famine. It was the astrophysics. Two worlds big enough to have a shirtsleeve environment are going to be tidally locked with each other, so each should always be in the same place in the other’s sky and present the same face, like Pluto and Charon. But the professor became very annoyed when I gave him an essay on how the astrophysics would have to work. He didn’t seem to get the concept of leading and trailing hemisphere, even when I related them to the near and far sides of Earth’s own Moon — and he knew I was an astronomy major.”
ahah! You are now my astronomy consultant, Missy. I hope you’re happy.
Wish I could put you in contact with her, but she lives in the Grissom timeline, which is thataway in paratime.
Anime moons really bother me. They all have the same features as our moon. Different planet, different universe, same moon. Even when there are two or more moons, of different sizes and colors, they all have exactly the same features in the same orientation, and they are always in the same relative positions in the sky.
Astrophysics don’t work that way! Multiple moons interact with each other, so there are only a few stable orbital configurations.
Exactly. Given the wide variety of moons right here in the Sol system, there’s no reason to expect to see the Moon Rabbit on any other planet’s moon (or the “engine” crater on Mimas, or any of the other wild and wonderful things we see on moons big enough for their gravity to render them spheroidal).
“If you don’t get up, you’ll never get up again,” I thought.
It was like Mercury kicking Aeneas’s butt to get back on the trail to Italy, to found what would eventually become Rome. Unlike Ulyssus, Aeneas didn’t lose all his men on the way home. And neither would I.